David Yarnold

President and CEO, National Audubon Society

David Yarnold is president and CEO of National Audubon Society, one of the oldest and best-known conservation organizations in the world. Audubon’s conservation mission is built on science, education, grassroots advocacy, and a network of 463 local chapters, 22 state offices and 44 Audubon centers across the United States.

Yarnold became Audubon’s 10th president in September 2010 and has led a transformation of the organization. He has launched numerous innovative social media efforts, including a national movement called "Because Conservation Doesn’t Have a Party" and has put cutting-edge mapping technology at the center of Audubon's reinvention.

Yarnold has aligned Audubon’s conservation work along migratory flyways, the "superhighways in the sky" that millions of birds travel each spring and fall. He oversees Audubon's Important Bird Area program, which protects 370 million acres along the flyways in the United States and frames efforts with other conservation organizations around the globe. Yarnold’s global background has deepened Audubon's alliances with BirdLife International and other partners to build a hemispheric air bridge for birds as they migrate across the flyways of the Americas. Under Yarnold’s leadership, Audubon also is reaching out to younger, more ethnically diverse audiences and launched Audubon en español.

With expertise in climate and energy issues, Yarnold has made environmentally friendly siting for renewable energy one of his highest priorities at Audubon.

Prior to heading Audubon, Yarnold was executive director of Environmental Defense Fund, where he played a leading role in expanding partnerships with corporations and helped double revenue. He also led the organization's political action arm and was its leading U.S.-based advocate for the creation of environmental markets in China.

He is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News. Yarnold is a marathoner, an earnest birder and still reads sports news in the morning before anything else.

Lobbyists often glean intimate knowledge of pending policy changes and activities that affect the fortunes of companies or industries they represent. Many also hold investments that overlap with their responsibilities.

Nations negotiating a climate-change deal are unlikely to agree on cutting carbon-dioxide emissions deeply enough to prevent the earth from warming by 2 degrees Celsius, the stated goal of the talks, participants say.

A plan to curb greenhouse-gas emissions alongside China sets the stage for lengthy confrontations with other nations resistant to making cuts, Republicans who want to roll back regulations and environmentalists pushing for bigger reductions.

Six international energy companies have agreed to work to reduce emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, in partnership with more than a dozen national governments through a new United Nations framework.